This has to be among the weirdest pieces of unsolicited mail I've ever received. Nigerian prince? That is so yesterday. Virtual pharmacy? Too much effort. No, what we want to sell you is a can opener!

Hi Sir/Madam,

Glad to hear that you're on the market for can opener …

Threads this week without commentary. (It has been a long week that included only one flight of four that actually happened without a delay, cancellation, or redirection.) Big announcements are one from the Library of Congress to re-envision the way bibliographic information travels, one from Douglas County (Colorado) Library's experiment …

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher's view of Amazon's strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …

I'm trying an experiment over the next couple days/weeks. I'm turning off the reCAPTCHA requirement for blog commenters (the figure-out-these-words-and-type-them-in anti-spam scheme I turned on three and a half years ago). The only automated scheme in place now is Akismet. This change was made Friday night, and over the …

I have to give the creator of the blog spam below points for trying. This is what I found in my WordPress spam queue this morning, embedded here as an image so as not to give Google juice to the spammer:

Honorable mention? Yes. An approved comment? Sorry.

Okay, I know this is starting to seem like an obsession, but I can't figure out why someone(s) would be constructing tweets that consist of my blog post headlines and links back to my postings. I'm wondering how wide spread this problem is, so I constructed a list of …

The following may not be news to those who regularly hang out in Twitter-land, but the extent of the problem recently became clear to me: there is a bunch of spam in Twitter. More specifically, there appear to be robots that do nothing but scan the web for keywords and …